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Does the future belong to Facebook?

2475846452 6fa95f6fcf Does the future belong to Facebook?

Image via: http://www.flickr.com/photos/libraryman/

Apologies for the absence, it’s unusually busy around here, especially for Summer. However, I wanted to point you to an article in this month’s Wired which is the first thing I’ve read that makes me re-think my assumptions about Facebook.

In particular this part of the article was eye-opening for me:

These are just the latest moves in an ambitious campaign to make the social graph an integral, ubiquitous element of life online. In December, Facebook launched Connect, a network of more than 10,000 independent sites that lets users access their Facebook relationships without logging in to Facebook .com. Go to Digg, for instance, and see which stories friends recommended. Head to Citysearch and see which restaurants they have reviewed. Visit TechCrunch, Gawker, or the Huffington Post and read comments they have left. On Inauguration Day, millions of users logged in to CNN.com with their Facebook ID and discussed the proceedings with their friends in real time.

In April, Facebook announced its Open Stream API, allowing developers to create mashups using Facebook’s constantly updated stream of user activity. Previously, users who wanted to read their friends’ News Feeds had to go to the Facebook site. Now developers can export that information to any site—or to freestanding applications, much as Twitter desktop clients do for Tweets.

Connect and Open Stream don’t just allow users to access their Facebook networks from anywhere online. They also help realize Facebook’s longtime vision of giving users a unique, Web-wide online profile. By linking Web activity to Facebook accounts, they begin to replace the largely anonymous “no one knows you’re a dog” version of online identity with one in which every action is tied to who users really are.

Essentially, Facebook is letting you use the expertise, preferences and recommendations of your social circle to navigate and filter the Web. If they are successful, I can see that I would want to bring my social graph (and its associated data) to bear on almost every interaction I have on the Web. As information grows, it will become less and less productive for me to browse or interact with any site anonymously.

I realise this is not new news, however the sophistication of many of the latest Facebook connect implementations that I’ve seen (I blogged about the Jansport one here) along with the amazing spread of Facebook connect across many of the sites I use has made me actually believe they could pull this off. Facebook is increasing in popularity as an email and chat client, even among people I know. They’ve just announced they’ve grown to 250 million worldwide users  – almost the population of the US. Many of our clients are now saying that Facebook is one of the top referrers of traffic to their sites.  And, these recent moves from Facebook are likely to increase the time spent within the Facebook experience, essentially making Facebook the portal though which I browse more and more of the Web. In this light it’s not surprising that there isn’t more of a panic about monetization. The end game is much bigger than any interim advertising inventory that they can uncover along the way.

All of this is making me start to reconsider the pecking order on the Web and beyond. What do you think?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 5:19 pm and is filed under social media, strategy, web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • sgerson
    forgive me, but I feel that I see this pattern often: current strategy exists, new strategy emerges, people decide new strategy is better in some absolute sense and wonder whether it will entirely usurp current strategy, new strategy is experimented with, and ultimately integrated into diversifying portfolio of strategies - which includes both new and old. rinse, dry, repeat. print publishing will not die, but simply renegotiate its function with online publishing. similarly, the non-social web (or non-social venues on the web) will not die, but simply renegotiate its function with the social web.

    oh and rarely do strategies go entirely extinct; they may continue existing but change their function to artsy/historical artifacts (e.g. typewriters).

    "If they are successful, I can see that I would want to bring my social graph (and its associated data) to bear on almost every interaction I have on the Web. As information grows, it will become less and less productive for me to browse or interact with any site anonymously."

    take search for example: when I'm looking for a good restaurant or a unique Valentine's Day restaurant, it may make sense to ask my friends. but when I wanna learn about some obscure surgery that my friends know nothing about, it may not (may make more sense to ask an expert community). and when I wanna learn about a sex change operation because I'm transgender, which is something neither my parents nor most folks in my life know, it may make sense to be entirely anonymous.

    Facebook is articulating the social side of the spectrum of our experience of the web. but ultimately, it's just making online life more similar to offline life.....or rather, more similar to life! in which we choose to be social, non, and/or anonymous, depending on the circumstances.

    so the juicy question for me is: under which circumstances/for which types of information interaction [clearly not sure how to frame this question] to use which type [crudely, the spectrum from non-social <=> social] of web? i.e. the juice is in developing an actual model, vs. painting one strategy as the future...
  • Totally agree, with your points which are good ones and I was not advocating this as the only future, but proposing it as a possible one which I still think is valid. To your point about expert communities versus social circles, I think Facebook is going there already with its groups. These are now simply filters I could choose to apply to various searches or interactions.

    However, I do believe that this is coming regardless of whether Facebook is the winner or not. The value of expertise and relevance as embodied by a social graph is so valuable and useful that it's a good bet there are a lot of different companies trying to figure this out from various angles.
  • chrisbrinkworth
    Just wait until Microsoft gives them a stack more shares in return for rolling out Silverlight as part of the log-in process. That will through a new dynamic into the industry.
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